Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Rips HBO's 'Winning Time' Series, Calling It Inaccurate, Boring & Dull

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Abdul-Jabbar offered a lengthy review of the show on his Substack on Tuesday, criticizing the series for being inaccurate and boring, describing the latter as an “immutable sin” that is committed by the show “over and over.”

“I’ll start with the bland characterization. The characters are crude stick-figure representations that resemble real people the way Lego Hans Solo resembles Harrison Ford,” Abdul-Jabbar wrote. “Each character is reduced to a single bold trait as if the writers were afraid anything more complex would tax the viewers’ comprehension. Jerry Buss is Egomaniac Entrepreneur, Jerry West is Crazed Coach, Magic Johnson is Sexual Simpleton, I’m Pompous Prick. They are caricatures, not characters.”

Abdul-Jabbar also derided the show for lacking humor, and did not find the frequent convention of characters breaking the fourth wall to be insightful or funny, concluding: “It never held my interest enough for me to care, let alone be outraged.”

As far as the accuracy of the show is concerned, Abdul-Jabbar acknowledged that writers often take certain liberties to more effectively drive home the themes or larger ideas of their stories, even if they are based on or depicting real-life events. Still, he lambasts the show’s creators, saying that they “deliberately avoided facts as if they were an STD.” In particular, he took issue with how current Lakers president Jeanie Buss is portrayed as a “naive daddy’s girl” at the beginning of the show.

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